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Gallegallo Revbrandia Sectory 24
Page 04
The Secundury was a stream with an average width of 60 m. and in many places quite deep. It had a great many little springs and streamlets flowing into it between steep cuts in its high embankments, which were of alluvial formation mingled with decayed vegetation. The banks almost all along were from 40 to 50 ft. high. We came across a large tributary on the right side of the river. It was evidently the stream to which we had first come on our disastrous march across the forest, and which I had mistaken for the Secundury. Beyond this river we came across some small rapids, of no importance and quite easy to negotiate by the large boats, although in one or two cases tow-ropes had to be used by the men who had landed in order to pull the boats through.
The earliest decorative art appeared in Ireland. It was probably first planted there by missionaries from Italy, and it reached its height in the seventh century. In the ninth and tenth centuries missal illumination of a Byzantine cast, with local modifications, began to show. This lasted, in a feeble way, until the fifteenth century, when work of a Flemish and French nature took its place. In the Middle Ages there were wall paintings and church decorations in England, as elsewhere in Europe, but these have now perished, except some fragments in Kempley Church, Gloucestershire, and Chaldon Church, Surrey. These are supposed to date back to the twelfth century, and there are some remains of painting in Westminster Abbey that are said to be of thirteenth and fourteenth-century origin. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century the English people depended largely upon foreign painters who came and lived in England. Mabuse, Moro, Holbein, Rubens, Van Dyck, Lely, Kneller--all were there at different times, in the service of royalty, and influencing such local English painters as then lived. The outcome of missal illumination and Holbein's example produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a local school of miniature-painters of much interest, but painting proper did not begin to rise in England until the beginning of the eighteenth century--that century so dead in art over all the rest of Europe.
I have met with no traces of the Virgin during the years between her Presentation in the Temple and her becoming head girl at Temple College. These years, we may be assured, can hardly have been other than eventful; but incidents, or bits of life, are like living forms--it is only here and here, as by rare chance, that one of them gets arrested and fossilised; the greater number disappear like the greater number of antediluvian molluscs, and no one can say why one of these flies, as it were, of life should get preserved in amber more than another. Talk, indeed, about luck and cunning; what a grain of sand as against a hundredweight is cunning's share here as against luck's. What moment could be more humdrum and unworthy of special record than the one chosen by the artist for the chapel we are considering? Why should this one get arrested in its flight and made immortal when so many worthier ones have perished? Yet preserved it assuredly is; it is as though some fairy's wand had struck the medieval Miss Pinkerton, Amelia Sedley, and others who do duty instead of the Hebrew originals. It has locked them up as sleeping beauties, whose charms all may look upon. Surely the hours are like the women grinding at the mill--the one is taken and the other left, and none can give the reason more than he can say why Gallio should have won immortality by caring for none of "these things."
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